College and University Roofing in Missoula, MT

On a campus, the first roof to fail is rarely the oldest one, and the order in which a facilities office repairs them decides how much money is spent twice. The University of Montana campus has 64 buildings on 220 acres, which means dozens of roofs of different ages, systems and exposures that cannot all be replaced in one summer. We start a campus program by ranking the roofs, because a replacement queue built on remaining service gives the budget a logic that a list built on complaints does not.

In Missoula, MT, that ranking has to account for snow, thaw and a short construction season, and then for terms, move-in weeks and events that close off parts of the campus. The sequence problem is as much about calendar as it is about membrane. Residence halls, lecture buildings, labs and athletic spaces each have different access and different tolerance for noise, so the program is built building by building and not as a single bid.

Campus work has fixed dates. Move-in week, finals, commencement and home athletic events all bring people and vehicles to areas where we would like to stage a crane. The University of Montana is the area's largest employer at 2,842, and the campus is occupied far beyond the classroom hours.

We lay out the staging area and the material hoist away from pedestrian routes, and we agree with the facilities office on closures before any roof is opened. Where a building houses research space, the dry-in sequence is planned so no section stands open while an experiment depends on the envelope. The calendar gets mapped on the roof plan, and each phase gets a start date, an end date and a weather allowance. Material deliveries need a path too. A truck bringing rolls of membrane and pallets of insulation cannot cross a pedestrian plaza at class change, so the route is written down and shared with campus security before the first delivery. Crane picks happen early, before the paths fill.

Missoula's inventory includes a downtown with more than 60 National Register buildings, and a campus often holds older halls with their own character. We do not assume the roof system on any historic building. The walk identifies it, and the owner confirms what approvals and materials are required before work is scheduled.

Older masonry buildings often have parapets, copings and gutters that need as much attention as the field. We check the top of each wall, the flashing at the roof edge and the drainage path. A repair that fixes the roof but ignores the parapet leaves the building exposed. The report lists both, so the facilities office can fund them together. The same questions arise for a government building or a church in an older district such as Downtown Missoula: what approvals apply, what materials are allowed and how the work looks from the street.

Every phase ends with a walk, a punch list and a set of photographs. The drains are tested, the flashings are checked and the surface is cleaned. The facilities office signs off, and the record goes into the campus inventory with the next review date. A campus program grows more useful each year, because every roof gets a dated history. By the third year, the inventory shows which roofs aged as predicted and which did not, and the replacement queue can be adjusted with real data. Facilities directors can then defend each year's request with photographs and cores, not with a general sense that the campus is old. A campus roof file starts with one building and grows by group, so the second summer builds on the first.